Investigating visual exploration of geospatial data: An exploratory usability experiment for visual data mining

This study presents a small exploratory usability experiment with the goal to observe how people visually explore geospatial data. The well-known iris dataset from pattern recognition was put into geographical context for this experiment, in order to provide the participants with a dataset with easily observable spatial and other relationships. The participants were given free hand to explore this dataset with a visual data mining system in any way they liked. The protocols collected during the experiment with the thinking-aloud method were analysed with the aim to understand what types of hypotheses the participants formed, which visualisations they used to either derive, confirm or reject their hypotheses and what exploration strategies they adopted.